Ernst Boris Chain

Hello, my name is Ernst Chain. I was born in a big city called Berlin, Germany, on June 19th, 1906. Ever since I was a little boy, I loved two things very much: science and music. It was like having two exciting puzzles to solve. My father was a chemist, which is a scientist who mixes things to see what happens. He would show me amazing experiments, and this made me very curious about how the world works. I wanted to understand the tiny, invisible things that make up everything around us. My love for science started right there in my home.

As I grew up, things in my country changed, and in 1933, when I was a young man, I had to move to a new country. I moved to England, which became my new home. It was a big change, but it led me to a very important job. I started working as a scientist at a famous school called the University of Oxford. There, I joined a team of other scientists led by a man named Howard Florey. Our team decided to study something very special: a fuzzy green mold that another scientist, Alexander Fleming, had found many years before. We thought it might hold an important secret.

This mold was called Penicillium. Alexander Fleming had noticed that it could stop bad germs from growing, but nobody knew how to turn it into a medicine that could help people. I was a biochemist, which means I study the chemistry of living things. It was my special job to figure out the mold's secret recipe. My team and I worked very hard in our laboratory. It took a lot of time and many experiments. Then, in the year 1940, we had a very exciting day. We finally figured out how to get the good part out of the mold and make it pure. We made it strong enough to fight infections inside a person's body without hurting them. It was a breakthrough.

We called our new medicine penicillin. It was a wonderful discovery. Before penicillin, a small cut or a sore throat could become very dangerous. But now, we had a medicine that could help people get better from those kinds of infections. It was like having a superhero to fight off the bad germs. In 1945, I felt very proud when my friends Howard Florey, Alexander Fleming, and I were given a very special award for our work. It was called the Nobel Prize. It was an honor to know that our teamwork was going to help so many people around the world.

I lived to be 73 years old. Today, people remember me as one of the scientists who helped turn a fuzzy green mold into a medicine that has saved millions of lives all around the world. It shows that teamwork and curiosity can change the world for the better.